A Walk in Wildwood

Buck and I planned to play golf last week, but he phoned me: "Instead of wasting our time and energy messing around with golf clubs, balls, and carts, why don't we just take a walk in the park, and not spoil it ala Mark Twain?"

I agreed, but not without pointing out that he owed me eight dollars from our last golf outing. We decided to meet at Wildwood, one of our metroparks.

We took one of the lesser-used trails and ended up at a bench next to Ten Mile Creek. "Ah, here we are," he said as he sat down. "Enough with the walking; this is our spot. We can sit here and enjoy the wonders of nature."

After a few minutes of meditative  silence, he pulled a flask and a couple of cigars. "And there's no reason we can't enjoy our vices and nature at the same time. Here you go, have a Montecristo, and there's some good scotch in the flask."

"I didn't know not playing golf could be so enjoyable, " I said

"I'm here," he said, "to educate you on the finer things in life. And the good thing is this education is tuition free."

"Give it up, Buck. You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

"Probably so. I've wasted much of my life sharing pearls of wisdom with you and all to no avail."

"I'm glad we have established that," I said as I created a near perfect smoke ring.

Buck took a slug of scotch, and savored it for a while. "Speaking of education reminds me of  our 'very stable genius' in the White House. Did you know he is refusing to get up from his desk because he was told you can't indict a sitting president."

After an appropriate groan, I was not to be outdone (or perhaps underdone). "Well at least he promised us he would hire the very best, Like Ben Carson, Secretary of HUD, a very stable genius in his own right who declared, 'Illegal immigrants caught voting should be stripped of their citizenship.'"

"You know," Buck said, "the only person Trump ever hired who was actually qualified to do their job was Stormy Daniels."

"It's not charitable of us to make fun of  Putin's Apprentice," I said. "He needs our admiration. After all, it's all about Donald. When informed of Aretha Franklin's death, the first thing he said was, 'She used to work for me.' A classic narcissistic response."

"Yeah, and we were so looking forward to his Russian-style military parade."

"Well, he didn't get his parade, but he found another hair-brained way to waste our money, the Space Force."

As dark clouds started to move in, we decided we had better start back to the parking lot. "That was a lot of fun," Buck said. "What would we have to talk about if we didn't have a very stable genius in the White House?"

N.B. Since any factual information in the above is pure coincidence,  I can't provided actual sources. Unfortunately, the Trump's quote about Aretha Frankilin's death and Carson's comment about immigrants are factual.